Scott McConnell reports on Kasich’s improving position in New Hampshire, and comments on his foreign policy views:
On foreign policy, Kasich seems understated but fairly hawkish: in two events I’ve heard him say Assad is a butcher who must be overthrown, and that he would arm the Ukrainians to resist Putin. I don’t know how fervently he believes this—he certainly isn’t making it a campaign feature. He’s domestically focused.
There was a huge explosion, which appeared to be a suicide bomb, near the Russian embassy in the Afghan capital of Kabul. Early reports said that at least four people were killed dead and 24 injured. So far no one has claimed responsibility for the attack which happened on Wednesday evening, local time.
Bret Stephens makes a predictably unpersuasive case that the U.S. should continue to support the Saudis:
All this means that the right U.S. policy toward the Saudis is to hold them close and demonstrate serious support, lest they be tempted to continue freelancing their foreign policy in ways we might not like. It won’t happen in this administration, but a serious commitment to overthrow the Assad regime would be the place to start.
Earlier this month, a black swan landed in the Mid-East when Saudi Arabia executed prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr along with 46 other “terrorists.”
Most of those executed were not Shiites but that didn’t matter. Al-Nimr was a key voice among Saudi Arabia’s dissident Shiite minority and his death reverberated across the Shiite community, sparking mass protests from Bahrain to Pakistan.
According to a United Nations report released on Tuesday, ISIS are holding around 3,500 people as slaves in Iraq. The report issued jointly by the UN human rights office and the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq says that most of those being detained are women and children from Iraq’s Yazidi community. The report said the scale of “systematic and widespread violence” perpetrated by ISIS from May to October 2015 was “staggering, with the enslavement of the Yazidi people being among the worst atrocities documented.